Posts Tagged ‘Conceptual art’

Conceptual art—well, maybe all art—should sock you in the gut and then hypnotize you. In that order. Eric Yahnker’s work is a one-two emotional/intellectual punch that combines immaculate craftsmanship with a brain of intimidating powers.

Witness <0 - 101 (above), a work that combines various media with numerical titles into a sequential order from “Less Than Zero” to “101 Dalmatians”. Or the artist’s colored-pencil commentaries on dianetics and Lance Armstrong. Or the beheaded John Wayne in tennis gear.

Yahnker’s work deals with death, neuropathology and the mucky vicissitudes of life in a manner that combines high-concept trickery with immediate visual appeal. Go forth, wanderer, and click heedlessly.

Nicole Cherubini’s sculptures are made of terracotta, porcelain, earthenware and other surfaces resulting from hand-built, thrown and molded processes. It looks old-school when viewed from afar, in other words, and totally (unexpectedly) contemporary when examined at close range. The artist started as a photographer but moved on to clay and has been working in the medium for years. “Clay and the vessel came to me as a complete conceptual tool for a discussion of lack and for an exploration of the decorative,” she’s said. Cherubini has also spoken about her interest in exploring the boundaries between two and three dimensions. (Cool.)

The artist draws on a wide-ringing but specific body of references in her work: the history of ceramics, Greek storage vessels, the artist’s Italian grandmother, the theorist Jacques Lacan, Hittite pots in Turkey, conceptual art of the 1970s and artists like Cindy Sherman, Robert Morris and Donald Judd. If you’re into abstractions and beautiful, complicated objects, she’s one to follow closely.

To e is Michael Crowe’s collection of YouTube screen grabs, some of which are altered and some of which are left as found. Try browsing for a minute or two. And then try stopping. Sometimes the simplest things can be profoundly mesmerizing.

Lucy and Bart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess, both Netherlands-dwellers with a shared interest in pushing the boundaries of art, fashion, and that nebulous area where the two meet.

McRae was trained as a classical ballerina and architect, so her interest in the human body is one with a precedent. Hess, for his part, maintains that he’s a better storyteller with visuals than with words, and has a fascination with robotics and imaginary animals. Together, the two “work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes, blindly discovering low – tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement.”

Their manipulations of the human form (via costume and digital voodoo) are eerie and beautiful in equal doses. Also occasionally grotesque––but never less than perfectly executed.

London-based artist Benedict Radcliffe approaches his work through a “love of machines and engineering, commercial branding and familiar logos or graphics,” often shifting their contexts or constituent materials in order to bend our minds.

You might recognize his most recent project for Classic Car Club UK: a wireframe model of a Lamborghini Koenig Countach built over the course of five months with 10mm welded steel tubes. The result looks like a three-dimensional blueprint, or a car viewed through x-ray goggles.

We think its pretty incredible–craftsman wizardry and childplay, both carried to their logical extremes.

Tao Lin is either a shameless prankster or a living, locomoting piece of conceptual art, depending on your perspective. Lin, who lives in Brooklyn, is the author of numerous novels (his first is titled Eeeee Eee Eeee), a book of poetry and a book of short stories. He runs a small press called Muumuu House, blogs, tweets, and sells things when he’s not writing for eight hours a day on the public computers at NYU’s library. Right now he’s shilling his private MySpace account on eBay.